女子(nǚ zǐ) - woman, female in Mandarin

女子 (nǚzǐ) means woman, but it belongs to written and formal Mandarin rather than to conversation. Two settings account for most of what you will meet. The first is news reporting, where an unnamed person is introduced as 一名女子, the equivalent of "a woman" in a British news bulletin. The second is sport and institutions, where it marks the women's category: 女子一百米, 女子足球队, 女子学校.

Its opposite number 男子 (nánzǐ) behaves identically, and the pair turn up together on every competition schedule. Learning them as a set costs nothing and unlocks a lot of signage.

The trap is using it in speech. Nobody points across a room and says 那个女子; that is 那个女的 or 那个女人. And unlike 美女 or 姑娘, 女子 is never a form of address. Say 女子，请问 to a stranger and you sound like a subtitle rather than a person.